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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

The hon. Gentleman is nodding that that is the case. I find it alarming that a person who is a lawyer—an officer of the Supreme Court—believes that by transferring responsibility for the determination of fact from a jury to a judge more convictions will be secured when the only change is that the determination of fact is by a person employed by the state rather than 12 free men and women of this country. That is to misunderstand our legal system in a way that I find alarming in a trained lawyer. As a layman, I understand the distinction here, and I would have hoped that the hon. Gentleman would as well. There has been constant reference to the complexity of serious fraud. We know that serious fraud is complex; it is of necessity complex. It is the job of prosecuting counsel to lay out those complex matters in a way that is intelligible to the court, and if they are not doing so, they are failing. If the argument is that the case is so complex that it cannot be produced in court at all and can only be handled by a judge in pre-trial proceedings reading through the supporting paperwork and coming to conclusions, we will have a more fundamental change to our legal system than we even suspect from the contents of the Bill. If, however, we are simply saying, ““Yes, these are complex matters and they will take a certain amount of time,”” then let us implement some of the procedural changes that we have already put in place. Let us see parts of Bills that we have debated at length in this House put into effect; I am thinking about the multiple count provision in previous legislation over which some of us agonised, only to find, to our horror, that that important issue is left on the shelf for years although it was considered to be a matter of great urgency. Let us see the management of the case deal with the presentation effectively. However, let us not take out the crucial element of British justice—the jury—in deciding how to deal with such matters. On the question of the length of cases, I come back to case management. I do not believe that it is necessary for summing-up speeches to take 50, 60, 70, 80 or even more than 100 days. I am sorry, but I do not accept that that is good presentation of, or good management of, a case, and it does not happen in the United States. The hon. Member for Wirral, West said that it is all down to plea-bargaining, but it is not; it is also about case management. I cannot remember the exact number of days that the Enron case took, but I think it was about 50 in total. That would not happen in this country. A similar case would not be heard in that time. That is the difference between the management of cases in the US and here. Let the British Government look at how cases can be presented better and more effectively in court, instead of removing the people who are the determiners of fact. Then there is the extraordinary argument, to which I drew attention in an intervention, that because only a limited number of people can be available for the time required, juries become unrepresentative, and a court’s representative nature is somehow improved by having the facts decided by one judge, rather than by 12 people drawn at random from the community. That is an absurd argument, and I hope that the Solicitor-General will not advance it again. There is also the argument about the full criminality of cases not being displayed. I have mentioned the multiple count legislation, which is already on the statute book. Those hon. and learned Gentlemen who speak with the authority of having acted in a criminal court know perfectly well that it is very rare for the full criminality of a multiple offender to be displayed to the court, because a prosecutor chooses what they will present before the court and what will secure the appropriate penalty. It is a complete red herring on the part of the Solicitor-General to suggest that the only way that justice can be secured is by putting before a court every single count of criminality that could be adduced to it in order to provide complexity, when complexity is actually unnecessary in securing an adequate conviction. I was in the room with the Home Secretary of the day—the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett)—as was the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), when we were promised that we would have proper debate, discussions and consultations between the parties on this very important matter. We were not given that. The Attorney-General asked a few of his chums in the other place round for a seminar, and we were told later, ““By the way, that was the consultation that you were promised.”” Our Front Benchers responsible for this issue were never invited to that seminar, or even advised that it was happening. That was the ““consultation”” between the parties that was supposed to have happened, at which we were supposed to have looked for alternatives to the removal of jury trial. We were not convinced that there would be a result, but we were happy to engage in such a conversation. We are left to conclude that the only reason that the Bill is before us today is that the Government are determined to chip away at the principle of jury trial. They have done it once, twice, three times—however many times—and they will continue to do so. I am sure that the Solicitor-General is giving his assurances on best advice and with the best of intentions that nothing further is planned. I am sorry to say, however, that nobody on the Opposition Benches—and not many on the Labour Benches—believes for a moment that, if the Bill is enacted through the use of the Parliament Act, there will not be a return raid yet again to remove elements of our judicial system. The Home Secretary said that the idea that justice is done before a court is an old-fashioned one. Those are the most chilling words that I have ever heard a Home Secretary say. I believe that justice is done in British courts before a British court with a British jury, and I am certainly prepared to defend that.